Discrimination-based Artificial Immune System: Modeling the Learning Mechanism of Self and Non-self Discrimination for Classification

This study presents a new artificial immune system for classification. It was named discrimination-based artificial immune system (DAIS) and was based on the principle of self and non-self discrimination by T cells in the human immune system. Ability of a natural immune system to distinguish between self and non-self molecules was applicable for classification in a way that one class was distinguished from others. We model this and the mechanism of the education in a thymus for classification. Especially, we introduce the method to decide the recognition distance threshold of the artificial lymphocyte, as the negative selection algorithm. We apply DAIS to real world datasets and show its performance to be comparable to that of other classifier systems. We conclude that this modeling was appropriate and DAIS was a useful classifier.